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Charlie Chaplin: The Silent star who stood up to Hitler

Charlie Chaplin was the first global celebrity — and he used his fame to speak up for Jews

February 18, 2022 02:01
TRCC FS 5
5 min read


The Little Tramp is back. The Real Charlie Chaplin, the new documentary by British filmmakers James Spinney and Peter Middleton, invites viewers to reconsider the silent movie star. A compelling cradle-to-the-grave portrait, using archive footage, unique audio recordings and dramatisations, and narration from former Doctor Who star Pearl Mackie, it’s a film that doesn’t flinch from Chaplin’s more troublesome side, just as it doesn’t stop short of appreciating his significance —particularly to Jewish people.

A far cry from Spinney and Middleton’s previous doc, 2016’s Notes on Blindness, the story of writer John Hull losing his sight, the film is a remarkable primer for those only dimly aware of Chaplin and his output. As the title suggests, it attempts to go behind the Tramp, the bowler hat-wearing vagrant with that all-too-familiar moustache that became his on-screen persona. “His Tramp character is really a vehicle for him to journey back into his past,” suggests Spinney. “Freud said about Chaplin, he’s destined to revisit the humiliations of his childhood.”

Tracing his path from his poverty-stricken upbringing in London’s Lambeth, the film posits that Chaplin became the world’s first global celebrity. “He first stepped onto the screen in 1914,” says Spinney. “But this is really just a shadow of the fame that he experienced during his lifetime. And a type of fame that really began with him. Before Chaplin, people had never been famous in that particular way. When he first steps on screen, films are just beginning to spread across the world. By 1916, his films are regularly being watched by hundreds of millions of people across different continents.”

As Middleton notes, Chaplin’s rise has been dubbed “the greatest rags to riches story of all time”, and it’s hard to argue against it. “We were kind of interested in, I suppose, just how that mythology that surrounds him was cultivated and the impact on him.” He cites the day, in 1921, when Chaplin returned to London, and he’s greeted by tens of thousands of well-wishers. “The papers were estimating, it would be more people coming out in the streets to greet him than on Armistice Day. The psychological disconnect that [he must have felt] is really striking.”

By now, Chaplin had co-founded Hollywood studio United Artists, giving him complete control over beloved films such as The Kid (1921) and The Gold Rush (1925). Yet this is just part of The Real Charlie Chaplin, which does a fine job of showing how Chaplin’s life ran in parallel to some of the biggest events in 20th Century world history. The Great Depression, for example, is commented upon in Modern Times (1935), a film about increased mechanisation. But it was the Second World War that, perhaps, came to define him.